This round-up of claims has been compiled by Full Fact, the UK’s independent fact checking charity which works to give people access to reliable information they can trust.
Are UK household energy bills the ‘highest in Europe’?
On September 1, in his first Commons statement since becoming Prime Minister, Andy Burnham claimed that UK “household energy bills are the highest in Europe”.
We’ve not found official data to support this claim for household “energy bills” as a whole, however. We asked No 10 and the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero what Mr Burnham’s claim was based on, but didn’t hear back.
The Government publishes figures comparing UK electricity and gas unit prices with those in most of the 32 members of the International Energy Agency (IEA), as well as EU member states.
These figures suggest that UK domestic electricity prices are among the highest in Europe but its domestic gas prices are generally lower than the median.
It’s important to note though that these figures do not compare the average household energy bills in these countries, which are affected by other factors, including the amount of energy consumed by households in different countries.
We’ve not found any reliable figures comparing average household bills in Europe, and Dr Filip Mandys, research fellow at the Bartlett School of Environment, Energy and Resources at University College London, told us he was not aware of any such data either.
We’ve instead looked here at how price data compares. Dr Mandys told us: “The existing evidence suggests high electricity prices specifically, but not a broader conclusion about total household energy bills.”
The latest available data published by the government is for 2025, and uses Eurostat data to compare the UK with EU member states, broken down by small, medium and large consumers. It does not show the UK as having the highest average annual domestic electricity or gas unit prices in any of these categories.
For medium consumers, the UK’s domestic electricity prices including taxes were higher than in all but three EU states (Belgium, Germany and Ireland), while gas prices were below the median.
The Government also publishes separate data comparing UK prices with IEA members – the most recent figures refer to 2024.
This shows the average unit price of electricity for domestic consumers in the UK was the highest among the 20 European IEA members for which comparable figures are available if you exclude tax, and second highest behind Germany including taxes. But the average unit price for domestic gas was below the median price across European IEA members for which figures are available.
For more details and analysis of a different claim from Reform UK leader Nigel Farage about how UK energy costs compare internationally, see our full fact check.
Kent Police didn’t say 76% of Dover protesters have previous convictions
Social media posts shared hundreds of times have claimed that Kent Police’s facial recognition team said “around 76% of Dover protesters have previous convictions for domestic abuse, paedophilia, GBH or drug dealing”.
But this is not true according to Kent Police—and the claim appears to be based on a joke post from a satire account.
Hundreds of masked anti-migrant protesters caused disruption at the Port of Dover on September 5.
Kent Police confirmed the post was inaccurate and that it did not issue or recognise the statistic.
An account which appears to have first posted the claim describes itself as an “obvious satire account” in its bio, but many sharing or commenting on the claim on social media have done so without any indication that the claim may not be genuine.
One Facebook post we saw was captioned “hands up those who are surprised by this information”, while an Instagram post said “a bunch of criminals dressed as vigilantes. What a joke!”
Before sharing content like this, it’s important to consider whether it comes from a trustworthy source. Our misinformation toolkit contains tips on how to do this.
